History walls can be incredibly effective tools to communicate a lot about your establishment in a small amount of space. They should run just as effective museum exhibits run—building curiosity and creating connections.
A history wall is a big undertaking, not only because you’re processing a ton of information, but you also need to be sensitive to who’s reading it. You can’t make up history…it already happened. So when companies, schools, and museums decide to create a history wall, it’s crucial to examine the motivation behind that decision. Start by asking:
Is this something your ideal viewer wants based on your research?
How long do you expect this wall to remain relevant?
In addition to those research questions, ground yourself in the following realities about history walls.
History walls have a maximum lifespan of about eight years.
People don’t want to stare at your history wall forever…and you wouldn’t want them to. This will not be a permanent fixture because history is constantly changing. After eight years, more events have occurred; language from the old wall might need to be adapted or condensed; and you may have new graphics or pictures to add.
As with any investment, you want to get your money’s worth, so it’s challenging to know there’s a maximum lifespan of a project before going into a project, but you can make small changes to your approach to remedy some of those growing pains:
Contract out the project to a history wall developer you trust.
Work with a DEIA expert to ensure language is as inclusive as possible.
Consider how easily items can be removed or added to the wall should something arise before a full makeover.
Do the research upfront to make sure this is something your target viewers are seeking.
Not everyone is going to care about the history of your company.
History walls are fantastic for visitors that want a deep dive into your background, but there are people who aren’t going to pay any attention to it at all. Ideally, the people who don’t care about your history wall are not in your primary target market.
If folks who are typically your main type of visitor aren’t stopping to check out your history wall, ask them why. It may be as simple as there’s too much to read. You might need to make it more of a multi-sensory experience. Or the graphics aren’t eye-catching to them. The worst case scenario would be that they’re not interested in the history of your establishment as much as they’re interested in the present and future. Knowing that upfront before you create the wall can save a lot of time and resources.
History walls aren’t textbooks.
All of your visitors and team members have gone through some level of schooling and encountered textbooks that were painfully boring. You’re making an investment to build a history wall that’s cool and exciting; don’t clutter it with too much information. If you do, no one will read it.
Work with a history wall developer to condense your text, whether you started by writing it yourself or had a firm create the text for you. Your history wall developer will know what’s too much or too little to get your main points across.
There’s a way to balance all of your company, school, or museum information, and it really boils down to what’s going to be most impactful for your primary visitors.
There’s not a cut-and-dried way to develop a history wall.
Sometimes, creating a history wall might just be about the connections that led to the creation of your establishment. For example, if a business in the automotive industry created a timeline wall, they might begin with a fact like, “We started as a swimming pool company and are now creating gas tanks.” Or “We started as a swimming pool company and now design underground military fuel bladders.” Figuring out when and where those events happened—and there may be dozens of them—then allows for your wall to become a story with connection points rather than a timeline with no explanation.
You also might decide to create a historical sculpture or interactive for your team members and visitors in place of a history wall. What you choose to create doesn’t have to be linear, but it does have to be engaging.
Sometimes history isn’t so nice, so it needs to be reframed.
One partner created a founders’ wall with the intention to show how much the company has grown since its inception. The wall showed the founders, who were all white men, and didn’t give context as to why they were showing these men. As a result, they received complaints that the history wall went against that company’s DEIA statement. They didn’t anticipate that the purpose of the wall would go unnoticed and therefore didn’t outwardly vocalize the main reason for creating it. They showed the founders to compare the company now to the company back in the 1920s—to show progress.
We need to take a magnifying glass to historical instances and recognize the realities. It’s not about shying away from the “bad stuff,” but instead making sure it’s reframed in a way that pays homage to the events that occurred as well as addresses how we can change things for the better in the future.
Developing a history wall is tough, but it’s worthwhile…
if you have everything in place to help it succeed. You have to look through many different lenses and be cautious about the way event descriptions and connections are worded. The extra precautions will make your history wall stand out.
History walls allow your clients, visitors, and team members to be proud that they’re associated with you in some way. They’ll take that information with them and share it wherever they go. History walls are another way to build stronger relationships, so they shouldn’t be thrown together haphazardly. They deserve the time and effort that it took to create that history in the first place.
We once got pulled into a project for which we were provided with the text and items for the history wall. We had no creative control over the development of the assets. A marketing company had written blocks of text to be placed next to the provided items—a textbook on the wall.
Since then, we have said that if you ever want us to do a history wall with no personality, please don’t call us.